William,
The point on silence had nothing to do with your personal habits of sharing/silence. The point was that lies are not free speech. They are a silencing of the truth. They have no positive content of their own when it comes to the sort of appearance in the polis we ar talking about here. They don't need to be defended and forcefully shutting down a violent weasel isn't a loss of speech. It is, in my opinion, exactly the thing that must be done. You can say "Ahhh but we will all have our villians to shut down. What then? Who is to decide?" All I can say is, well we are of course and it really isn't that mystified. If you are willing to surrender all hope of distinction and discernment between human rights and their attackers then all hope really is lost and this conversation is meaningless. I am not willing to.
Everything you think of as just normal everyday America involves all sorts of utopian thinking. There is no world building that is not Utopian. I think if you read the whole essay by Camus (remembering it has some language of it moment) I think it will be easier to follow what I am saying.
It is at this link, broken down the six or seven short bits as it originally appeared in Combat. It also came around the time of Camus' public debate with Mauriac on the how to deal with the Vichy after the war. It marks a turn on that account.
Feel free to ask for clarification of anything hazy. I work full time demolition and then full time classes at night and family and poetry and all that jazz. I write this stuff quickly and off the hip. It deserves more but its all I got.
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